Category Archives: Events

CNA’S BICYCLE & PED PARADE ON AUGUST 4th is CANCELLED but THE NNO CELEBRATION WILL GO ON THAT EVENING WITH A FREE CONCERT & MOVIE IN FERNHILL PARK!

CNA’s National Night Out Parade has been cancelled due to the extreme heat, but as the temperatures start declining on the evening of August 4th, please join us at FERNHILL PARK for a night of traditional Afro-Mexican folk music, song, and zapateado (percussive dance) by COLECTIVO SON JAROCHO DE PORTLAND from 6:30 to 8:15 PM.

Then stay at the park and beat the heat with a cool nighttime showing of THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE (Subtítulos en Español) at SUNDOWN sponsored by ROSE CITY MORTGAGE & your CNA!

There will be fun activities at the park, including:

Children’s Art Activities by COLLAGE

Balloon Animals & Hats

Henna Tattoos

Firetruck to Explore with Local Firefighters

There will be FREE popcorn, popsicles, and water for all! Bring a picnic dinner or buy a meal from one of our 4 food vendors!

Bring a blanket, or low-back concert chair, relax in the hopefully cool breeze and enjoy the show!

Sunday August 06, 10:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.

Join our on-the-water festival and celebrate the Columbia Slough!

At this year’s Regatta, over 500 people will have the opportunity to rent a canoe or kayak from the Council (free of cost) to explore and learn more about this special hidden gem. Despite the name, the Columbia Slough Regatta is not actually a race, but more of a leisurely wildlife-watching group paddle. The event celebrates the watershed with fun and free activities for community members to develop connections with nature and neighborhood resources.

The Oregon Air National Guard (OANG) and the Port of Portland will co-host a community “Fly Day” on July 8, 2017 at Helensview High School and you’re invited!

The intent of the Fly Day is to demonstrate the ground track and flight profile of the Continuous Descent Overhead Approach flown by 142nd Fighter Wing aircraft, as well as to answer any questions about this expanded procedure.

The Fly Day event is scheduled for July 8, 2017 from 1PM to 3PM. at

Helensview High School

8678 NE Sumner St, Portland, OR 97220

In the event that the winds and weather necessitate an easterly traffic flow, the location will be moved to the Columbia Children’s Arboretum.

Columbia Children’s Arboretum

10040 NE 6th Dr. Portland, OR 97211

A booth will be set-up at the Helensview school on the afternoon of the event to provide updated information.

For more information about the Continuous Descent Overhead Approach procedure follow the link below:

This is a celebration of bicycling to get groceries. This is an alternative to driving to the store. We know that half of automobile trips are 3 miles or less and we want people to consider the sustainability aspect of bicycling to bring home fresh food in a convenient and sage manner.

The event will provide

Free white plastic buckets for rear rack panniers (& will help affix them to the bikes!)

We will be featuring Bicycle ambassadors from Portland Bureau of Transportation helping people find their best low volume streets from home to fresh food.

Queen Bee and North Street Bags showing off beautiful panniers for carrying groceries in style.

Cosmo spaghetti sauce samples.

Grand Central Bakery goodies

Cat Six Bicycle store will be on hand to evaluate bicycles and offer a discount for tune up/repair.

Cat Six and Clever Cycles will be showing bicycles built for carrying groceries and kids

Raffle to win a pair of North Street Panniers.

This is a first for Portland. New Seasons is taking on this campaign to help people use the Bicycle Boulevards in order to get groceries in a sustainable manner.

Erinne Goodell and Kirk Paulsen enjoy a variety of bike rides during every June’s Pedalpalooza. This year they’ll lead one of northeast Portland’s alleys, including some in Concordia. Photo by Chris Baker

Riding bare as you dare in a sea of other naked bike riders happens once every June during Pedalpalooza. The World Naked Bike Ride highlights the importance and vulnerability of people on bikes in the U.S. oil-centric culture.

The June 24 event – which begins this year at Fernhill Park –is also the biggest event of more than 230 free organized bike rides held during Portland’s month-long Pedalpalooza, an annual family-friendly celebration of bicycle delight.

In fact, the Concordia neighborhood is featured in a June 18 ride led by neighborhood residents Kirk Paulsen and Erinne Goodell, exploring the back alleys of northeast Portland.

“Something important to know going into Pedalpalooza, is that you’ll likely rest as much as you ride.” Kirk explained. “Many rides operate on ‘bike time,’ where the rides don’t usually start until 15 minutes or more after the scheduled time of departure.”

“Of course there are rides led by local bike shops and organizations that operate strictly on schedule,” Erinne added. “But generally, there’s as much socializing as bicycling to be found.”

Like the rides planned by Erinne and Kirk, all of Pedalpalooza’s themed rides are organized by individuals throughout the Portland and Vancouver metro areas. Find the schedule on Pedalpalooza.org.

There are fast rides and slow rides, costumed rides, and rides that involve plenty of noise and bright lights. Some show off specialized bikes, like folding or cargo bikes, and others dare people to get lost in the city at midnight.

Some teach how to maintain bikes, or to advocate for safer streets. BikeLoudPDX, a local grassroots advocacy group, leads advocacy and protest rides, like demonstrating against widening I-5 near the Rose Quarter.

Pedalpalooza started in 2003 as an offshoot of Bike Summer, during which Portland adopted its own version of the World Naked Bike Ride. Both were organized, international events similar to Critical Mass, in which people on bikes rode together through city streets to bring attention to the need for safe bicycle lanes and parking, and to celebrate the joy of biking.

Pedalpalooza is now facilitated by shift, a grassroots, volunteer-led, bikefun community formed during Bike Summer. Members strive to demonstrate the value of bicycling through activities that are fun, free, inclusive and, in this case, great for kicking off summer.

Riley, certified EIT, works in land development and site engineering, and can be reached at RSOboyle13@gmail.com

HIV Day Care Center volunteer George (left) and social work intern Tate review orders while preparing breakfast for clients. The center is one of two agencies in the Portland area – and one of 60 on the continent – to receive funding from Dining Out for Life on Thursday, April 27. Photo by Marcus Murray

Dining Out for Life (in Concordia)

Thursday, April 27

Dine out at one of seven Concordia restaurants Thursday, April 27, and you can make a difference in the lives of people with HIV and AIDS.

The businesses are among 35 restaurants in Portland and 3,000 across North America donating a portion of their April 27 proceeds to Dining Out for Life. That nonprofit organization distributes the funds to 60 outstanding HIV/AIDS service organizations, including two in Portland.

Drive up and drop off your unwanted/expired prescription drugs and sensitive documents. Drugs will be safely incinerated and documents will be securely shredded on site. By participating, you reduce the risk of identity theft and misuse of prescription drugs. Sunshine Division donation barrels will be available for donations of canned food, dry pasta, and gently-used clothing for needy families. Tax deduction forms will be provided.

According to Donna Maxey (left), RACE TALKS draws people of diverse perspectives, races and ages, even her mother, Mrs. Johnnie Maxey

Let’s start at the beginning. “My parents were always involved in community service,” said Donna Maxey, RACE TALKS founder. “I was an activist in utero.” “My father belonged to the NAACP as a college student which was considered an underground activity at the time for which he could have been kicked out of school.

After migrating to Oregon from Texas, her parents became active in the Republican Party – the party of Oregonians Tom McCall, Mark Hatfield and Clay Myers – and her father became president of the Young Republicans. “There were always people coming and going from the house, and things going on,” Donna recalled.

“My first solo protest march without my parents was when George Wallace came to the Hilton Hotel in the early 1960’s “I’ve always been independent and pulled for the underdog, which is probably why I ended up being a teacher,” she said

In that role, and others, Donna has found herself blazing trails. “I’ve been the first and only Black person in too many situations, so much that I don’t have to be the first or only anything ever again.”

Growing up in Portland she was always around white people, but attending Pacific University was a culture shock for her. “I was surrounded by white people.” But that didn’t discourage her activism or her belief in building relationships – what she calls “the R word.”

The feeling of being surrounded intensified during her first teaching job in Oroville, California. “It was John Birch country and I was the first and only Black school teacher in the small, rural town.” Intensifying her dissimilarity to the rest of the community was her husband at the time–a white Jew who was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War era.

While teaching in Portland Public Schools, she was introduced to “Courageous Conversations About Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools,” by Glenn E. Singleton and Curtis Lenton.

“The activities helped us to look at social interactions from perspectives other than our own. When one particularly ‘difficult’ person ‘got’ it, I thought, ‘This is powerful.’

“The only problem was that it was associated with people’s paychecks. If you expect people to make change and it’s connected to their paychecks, it doesn’t necessarily change their minds. It needs to be separate from people’s paychecks.”

In 2010, Donna was one of the several speakers at a McMenamins History Pub program, “Urban Renewal, Urban Removal,” and was upfront about the racism that accompanied the physical and economic displacement her family experienced during the early 1960s.

She was perplexed at how to explain the magnitude of that loss. “How can I share this so people understand what kind of home and community I lived in and what it did to us?” So, instead, I described the fauna and flora in our yard. People were just struck by this. Hey! A boxwood shrubbery is a boxwood shrubbery, regardless of what color the people in the house are.”

The first speaker talked about the unfair laws passed allowing the city and the Portland Development Commission to summarily move the Black community “It was all very technical,” Donna noted. The next speaker was a pictorial historian with photos of the Albina community dating from the 1800s to the early 1960s when the Veterans Memorial Coliseum and Lloyd Center were built. The third speaker was a Black real estate agent who discussed the home purchasing policies of the time.

Then it was Donna’s turn. “The Black community was decimated. My family lost our home, our neighborhood, our church, Daddy lost his barbershop.”

That led to the 2011 partnership between Donna, Uniting to Understand Racism and McMenamins to start RACE TALKS, which they bill as, “filling the spaces between race with compassion and education.”

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